Taking the Risk out of SharePoint Migration
Reprinted from SharePointProConnections.com:
“The majority of SharePoint migration projects fail because of lack of planning and inadequate resources,” says Christian Buckley, who directs product evangelism at Axceler. “But you don’t know until you try to migrate, then see a failure.” Axceler’s Davinci Migrator for SharePoint 2010 aims to change this by making your migration to SharePoint 2010 succeed from the start, analyzing your environment with an eye to reducing the number of failed migration attempts and shortening project schedules.
Prior to migration, Davinci Migrator runs what Buckley calls a “pre-flight check.” This pre-migration analysis offers color-coded results that let you identify issues at a glance during planning, rank them by severity, and get recommendations on actions before moving forward. You can then make changes or choose to override the analysis. Davinci Migrator also supports migrating in waves, based on user-defined timetables, priorities, and severity of issues found by the pre-migration analysis, letting organizations migrate clean sites first and focus resources where they’re needed. Typical issues the pre-migration analysis finds often involve permissions, third-party Web Parts, and broken URLs, Buckley says.
Many customers remember the pain of moving from SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, he says, and might be delaying 2010 or might be setting up a separate 2010 system for new projects and figuring out the rest later. Larger customers have mixed environments, running both 2003 and 2007. But that’s no longer necessary, he adds, “You can move both at the same time—Davinci Migrator offers support for both granular and entire-site migrations from SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010."
When you first log in to Davinci Migrator, you see a UI with three tabs: Discover, Plan, and Migrate. The Discover tab reveals a query engine that walks you through building a query to find sites, and it offers canned as well as custom queries. The pre-migration analysis offers an at-a-glance visual of sites by URL with various issues, coded in red or yellow shading to denote severity. At the Plan tab, you can create a migration set of sites you want to move and indicate where you want to move them. The Migrate tab lets you create rules for specific migration sites you’ve set up and lets you map permissions for sites.
Buckley adds that Davinci Migrator is not a one-time migration tool: “In three to six months, the needs of your organization might change and you’ll be using it again.” Although the expected large enterprises have shown interest in the solution, he says, smaller companies are interested in it as well, particularly those with complex SharePoint implementations. To learn more, see www.axceler.com.
